Unseen Demons

by Adam-Troy Castro

  But she had barely begun her first sentence when Rhaig stepped forward and said: “Excuse me — but with all due respect to the purpose that brought us here today, I must raise serious objections to this woman’s presence here.”

  The general murmur that greeted this statement was punctuated by a few angry shouts, most of those human. The cries of protest from Ambassador Lowrey were especially loud; unfortunately, so were the hoots of laughter from Emil Sandburg. Cort herself said nothing, content to let the next few seconds play themselves out.

  Nom’s face wrinkled with a series of dumbfounded blinks. “Her presence? On the grounds?”

  “On the grounds that the real issue here today isn’t the psychological aberration of one diseased individual, but the habitual Hom.Sap arrogance toward less developed peoples.” Rhaig’s words boomed across the chamber, dominating the assemblage despite the dull roar that began to swell before he was even finished with his sentence. He didn’t wait for the tumult to subside, but instead spoke louder, riding out the spectator reaction, beating it down, and finally conquering it. “Justice isn’t about punishing crimes, or even about providing victimized peoples the means to fight for justice; it’s about taking steps to ensure that such crimes never happen again. To do that, in this case, we must recognize where these crimes are coming from. To do that, we must recognize that the human species has been committing such crimes with monotonous regularity since they first climbed down from the trees — and that they haven’t slowed down after finding their way to the stars. It’s a constant, with these people.” He gestured at Andrea Cort. “Even with our colleague, the learned Counselor from the Hom.Sap Confederacy. That’s why I protest her involvement: because she has a history of participating in crimes just as heinous.”

  The roar erupted again: a tidal wave of noise, overwhelming the decorum of the proceedings, turning the room into a polyglot of shouted words in a dozen separate languages. Even the AIsource flatscreens, which usually communicated only in raw fact, scrolled their text so frantically that the flashing effect made them seem to be shouting. Andrea Cort, still keeping her own counsel, noted only that Whalekiller was among those shouting…and that the smiling Emil Sandburg was not.

  Rhaig continued: “It happened a long time ago, so you might not all know the facts of the case — but many years ago, on a world called Bocai, a small colony of Hom.Sap settlers turned on the indigenes who had been living alongside them in peace with a savagery that outdid anything the demented Mr. Sandburg has done. From all reliable reports, every able human being in the colony participated — even the children — and the peaceful Bocai needed to resort to violence themselves to defend their families. One of the human criminals, caught with Bocai blood beneath her fingernails and between her teeth, was a young child only eight years of age by the human mercantilescale; a child who sane justice would have condemned as a threat to everything to lived, but who was instead rewarded — REWARDED!” he shouted, with sudden rage, “with adoption by the Diplomatic Corps and training in a career with their Judge Advocate! Do we want to honor their hypocrisy by allowing such a creature to speak? Do we?”

  The roar that had filled the chamber now engaged in pitched battle with itself, the universal desire to shout louder, to protest louder, to be louder, acting as natural enemy to the simultaneous need to choke back all that noise and hear whatever Andrea Cort had to say in response. Cort did not make the amateur mistake of trying to answer the Tchi’s charges too soon; instead, she just remained silent, her face impassive, her demeanor calm, her attitude that of a woman in no particular hurry to be heard.

  It was an open dare to Counsellor Rhaig, to continue haranguing her.

  But Rhaig, who had evidently expected the kind of fight that would have permitted him to shout her down, had peaked too early. He had nowhere else to go. He had to fall as silent as everybody else, awaiting either Cortís reaction or the reaction of whoever stepped forward to defend her.

  The roar died to a murmur. Then a moment of hoarded breath.

  Cort did not rush to fill the silence. She just waited, one two three beats, while the mood of the gathering evolved moved from anticipation to out-and-out worry.

  Mekile Nom leaned forward. “Counselor Cort? Do you have any response to that?”

  She held the silence one more heartbeat, and said, “Yes.”

  She stepped forward, speaking in a soft murmur that commanded attention from all the sentients who otherwise might have been moved to drown her out. “Counselor Rhaig is correct. I was at the Bocai Massacre. I participated in the Bocai Massacre. I—“ She paused to allow the renewed hubbub another second or two to die down. “I was a child at the time. I will further point out that the incident in question involved not one, but two separate communities both erupting in unmotivated violence against each other for no apparent reason. The madness they shared was so savage and so unmotivated that debate has raged for years over the possible existence of an organic or environmental factor beyond their conscious control. No independent investigation has ever succeeded in determining the cause.”

  “And their fear of human reprisals had nothing to do with that?” Rhaig said. “Counselor! Really!”

  Cort proceeded as if he hadn’t spoken. “If anybody present here today wishes to review the facts to determine whether I’m truly as guilty of great crimes as Counselor Rhaig claims, please feel free. I personally agree with him, and I’ve taken the precaution of sending the full text of the interspecies investigation on Bocai to each of your embassies by hytex. But regardless of how you ultimately judge me, NONE,”she said, repeating the word for emphasis, “NONE of what you decide to believe about me should affect what I came here to say; the facts I offer cannot be changed by the character of the sentient who speaks them. The implication that they might has more to do with Counselor Rhaig’s private agenda, and his own complete shamelessness, than it does with the reason we’re here.”

  She let that thought sink in, and scanned the room for reaction; she saw sympathy, disgust, admiration, loathing, anger, and even sheer confusion. But they were all listening. They were, if anything, paying closer attention than they might have if Rhaig hadn’t smeared her. She spotted Mukh’thav among the Riirgaans and Haat Vayl among the Tchi; neither had shown her particular sympathy during their interviews, but they were both rapt as hungry men offered their first meals after long enforced fasts. She glanced at the Hom.Sap contingent next, and saw that (the grinning Sandburg aside) they’d all been affected the same way — but then they couldn’t be blamed for such a reaction after Rhaig had attempted to magnify the issue hero into a judgement on the entire human race. She had their support, for whatever that may have been worth.

  She certainly had Whalekiller’s. Though still seated, he resembled a coiled spring about to leap. His eyes flickered toward Rhaig, then caught hers. She could not quite read what she saw there, but anger on her behalf was part of it.

  She allowed her lips to twitch, and moved on: “However, one thing Mr. Rhaig said is relevant to my point. He cited what he called the human attitude toward less developed peoples. I liked that phrase. Less developed peoples. It says less about human beings than it does about the assumptions that brought us here today. Our assumptions toward the very people whom this hearing is supposed to be about.” Addressing Rhaig, she asked: “Is it your belief that the Catarkhans are inadequate in some way? That they need to be developed? That they’d be developed, in part, by the ability to communicate with us?”

  Rhaig feigned nausea. “The Counselor is twisting my words—”

  There was more, but she rode over it, reclaiming the floor as easily as he’d claimed it for his previous attack on her. “I am pointing out that the First Contact Protocols which have served us so ably elsewhere are less than appropriate for this species. As much as all our own races have benefited from our mutual association, from our cultural and technological exchanges, from our free trade and from the opportunity to see existence through differently
evolved perspectives, we all should admit that the Catarkhans were doing just fine by themselves before we came along. Maybe all our attempts to contact them have just been an exercise in gratifying our own egos. Maybe we think we can elevate them by finding some way to make them notice us. And that’s not true. We can’t make them notice us. We can only disturb them in ways they’re not evolved to handle.”

  “Ways that include murders committed by humans,” Rhaig said.

  “By a single diseased human,” Cort said, “but yes. —And what about our insistence on including them in our efforts to seek justice for crimes committed on their soil? It’s well-meaning enough, and it’s perfectly appropriate when we’re dealing with species capable of understanding concepts like crime, but isn’t it perverse to require Catarkhan input when providing input of any kind seems utterly alien to their fundamental nature? Doesn’t that say more about what we need from them, than from what they need from us?”

  Rhaig, who had been staring at her throughout her speech, unable to determine where she was going with this, took another shot. “You all see where the Hom.Sap counselor is going with this. She is making excuses…:

  “No, I’m not,” she said, with an insistence that immediately shut him up again. She turned as she spoke, addressing all the gathered sentients in turn. “There are no excuses here. I want Mr. Sandburg to face justice as much as you all do. But I’m asking you to recognize that requiring him to be judged by Catarkhan standards is, by definition, requiring them to develop standards. That’s defining them by our rules. That’s denying them protection from people like Mr. Sandburg, because we have trouble living with the awareness that they don’t need the rest of us either. And that,” she said, directing her last words to Mekile Nom, “is a crime, just as surely as anything Mr. Sandburg did.”

  That disturbed the little Bursteeni. Silencing Rhaig, who had a no-doubt outraged response to this, with an outstretched hand, he regarded Cort through eyes turned grey with moral exhaustion. “These are not exactly startling arguments,” he said, “and they don’t change anything about the essential problem here. The First Contact Protocols—“

  “…don’t apply here,” Cort said.

  That caused a stir. A small one, that didn’t even begin to match the response to Rhaigís revelations about her, but a stir nevertheless. All around her, the chamber turned electric with the knowledge of a net about to drawn tight.

  Nom, wary but unable to anticipate her intent, said, “The last thing I heard, Counsellor, this was supposed to be a First Contact mission.”

  She directed her next words not at the presiding chairman but at the entire chamber: “Then, why, precisely, aren’t there any Catarkhans attending?”

  Silence.

  “They’re not here,” Cort said, “because it makes no sense for them to be here. They wouldn’t participate. They wouldn’t pay attention. They wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t even know that any of this was happening. Oh, we could bring some here by force, but they wouldn’t be ambassadors; they’d be prisoners. Or worse — specimens.”

  “That doesn’t excuse killing them!” Rhaig shouted.

  “No, sir, it does not. But it does change the nature of the crime, and it does simplify the issue of finding justice. It eliminates the need to shackle ourselves with the Protocols for First Contact.”

  Rhaig practically exploded at that. “How?”

  “The Catarkhans,” she said, smiling broadly now, “have not been contacted.”

  16

  The pandemonium that followed arrived in slow-motion. It was Nom who got it first. Typically, for a member of his species, he reacted with effusive appreciation, bobbing up and down in his seat like a cork, waggling his fingers with glee. “Oh, very good, andreacort! Very good!” The Hom.Sap contingent erupted with gasps and muttered damns. Emil Sandburg woo-hooed, the AIsource flatscreen flashed A FINE ARGUMENT in Hom.Sap. standard lettering, the Riirgaans exploded with frenzied consultation, and then the shock just rippled through the room in waves, turning the gathering into a babble of voices demanding to know if it could possibly be as simple as all that.

  Rhaig attempted to reclaim the floor: “I fail to understand how my colleagues can celebrate such a self-serving Hom.Sap tactic.”

  “They celebrate it,” Cort said, “because they felt as trapped by the seeming confines of the law as we did. They knew there was no way Sandburg could be judged by the Catarkhans. They just didn’t see, until now, how we were going to get around that fact.”

  “Justice,” Rhaig said, “is not an inconvenience to be…gotten around.”

  “Nor is it something to be penned behind false barriers,” Cort said. “That was in danger of happening here. You believed that because you were here on first-contact missions, that this was a first-contact situation — while the facts quite clearly illustrate that it’s nothing of the kind. It can’t be. First contact hasn’t been made yet.”

  “I would call murdering sentients in their homes a pretty definitive form of contact, Counsellor.”

  “I would, too — but then my human perspective, and your Tchi viewpoint, are both totally beside the point here. That’s why I spent so much time during my investigation consulting so many of you, confirming that Mr. Sandburg’s crimes didn’t constitute a form of contact.” She addressed Rhaig: “Remember, Counselor? When I asked your expert Dr. Vayl if punching you in the face would qualify as a form of communication?” The gathering rippled with laughter, some of it from Dr. Vayl. She continued: “Vayl said yes, even if the differences between our species prevented you from knowing what that punch signified. He said that inflicting pain qualifies as communication. A low form of communication, he said, but communication nevertheless. And I agree, it does. If the Catarkhans victimized by Mr. Sandburg had been able to suffer pain, then the First Contact protocols would be in force now.

  “But Dr. Mukh’thav of the Riirgaans assured me that Mr. Sandburg’s crimes, brutal as they were, did not include torture, because it was utterly impossible for the Catarkhans to have felt pain, or even to know what was happening to them. A message may have been sent, all right…but none was received. Therefore, no First Contact.

  “I’ll even cite a precedent. There was a case, several years ago, where a starship from a species I won’t name jettisoned waste radioactive waste in an inhabited system. It was a stupid and irresponsible thing to do, and it resulted in serious environmental damage when the waste entered the gravity well of the world with sentient aboriginals. There were arguments, then, that the criminals in question should have be judged by the aboriginals they had so grievously harmed. This would have presented serious difficulties, as there had been no actual physical contact, and explaining the nature of the crime to the aboriginals would have required first making contact, then establishing communication, then explaining radioactivity and space travel to them first. It was judged that the crime itself did not constitute first contact, and that the crime could be dealt with by existing interspecies law. So, too, with this.”

  “That was accidental contamination!” Rhaig shouted. “This was deliberate murder! You can’t compare the two!”

  “I don’t intend to,” Cort said, “since, as it turns out, assigning jurisdiction doesn’t really matter here anyway. The action we would take if left to ourselves and the action the Catarkhans would take if the question could be put to them are equal.”

  Whereupon she told them what they should have known all along.

  17

  The closing statement of Counsellor Andrea Cort, edited to remove various ineffectual interruptions by the Tchi Gayre Rhaig:

  A. CORT: Ironically, even if this hearing eventually finds against this argument, and concludes that the First Contact Protocols still apply in this case — that still has no bearing on what we ought to decide.

  Politics aside, interspecies resentments aside, our decision on the matter of Emil Sandburg turns out to be an obvious one; we just haven’t examined the s
ituation closely enough to recognize the inevitable even as it looms before us waiting for us to notice it.

  But when the story of this case is told, the students of interstellar law will note that there were really, always, only a limited number of ways we could have dealt with Sandburg.

  If you eliminate letting him get away with his crimes — an option we must all as civilized peoples reject with total revulsion — there are, in fact, only three.

  We could have judged him by our best approximation of Catarkhan law.

  We could have deferred the question, until we were able to establish communication with the Catarkhans and find out for sure what they wanted.

  Or we could have judged him by Human law, since Sandburg also broke the laws of the Corps he was supposed to represent.

  Three possible approaches.

  All equally legitimate; our wrangle over jurisdiction has prevented any one of them from being chosen.

  But let us examine their implications.

  Deferring judgement would delay this case for years, maybe even lifetimes. Mr. Sandburg would have to be imprisoned until he could be judged. If we never establish contact, it amounts to a life sentence.